I’m trying to keep these site maintenance posts interesting by including something completely unrelated. Is it working?

Last Friday and Saturday we had the annual Culture Festival at Yahata High School, so today I had a day off for having gone to work on the weekend. How did I spend my day? Well, if any of you were trying to read my blog, you may have figured out that I was fiddling with the code.

After twelve straight hours of coding, I probably feel the way the guy in this picture looks.

Actually, it wasn’t quite twelve straight hours. I stopped for lunch, made supper, and managed to be of almost no assistance with the evening housework and child-wrangling. Still, it was exhausting and now I feel like my brain has had all of its higher functions squeezed through a lime press. I still have some changes in the works, but nothing as radical as the changes to the visual design.

The photo is from the Tobata Gion Oyamakasa, a festival that’s held annually in late July. Teams of men from each of the four districts of Tobata Ward carry ten-metre-tall (that’s approximately thirty feet) lantern floats, through parts of the neighbourhood. The orange blur in the background of the photo is the bottom corner of one. On the first night of the festival, all of the floats are paraded through central Tobata. On the the second night, each float is taken to its respective neighbourhood.

This description doesn’t do the festival justice, nor does the photo. If there’s interest, I’ll write a more complete post, and include some better photos.